Jebus help me, but I'm going to a 10 p.m. screening of this in IMAX tonight. I expect nothing but a catastrophically appalling trainwreck, and yet I can't stop myself from seeing it with my own eyes. Reading your highly entertaining evisceration of it, and hearing Mark Kermode's sterling rant against it, only heightens my curiosity. I guess it's the same impulse that made me watch two versions of Snyder's Justice League ... maybe somehow Coppola's been possessed by the spirit of Michael Cimino?
It was like Coppola's insufferable segment from New York Stories stretched out to 140 minutes, and coated in fake gold paint, with a script stolen from first year philosophy oral exams.
I saw MEGAPOLIS tonight—and while it's overblown and flawed, I ended up liking it. It's both brilliant and batshit crazy—my best friend, who saw it with me, described as "The Best and Worst of Francis Ford Coppola". Okay, Nathalie Emanuel's Julia Cicero was everything I liked Zendaya's Chani in DUNE for not being (sweet loving helpmeet of The Great Man), and I wasn't sure what the point to Adam Driver's Cesar Catilina's drunken and drug-fueled excess was—all I knew was I wanted to find him a Twelve-Step Sponsor, at once!
I think the point to Cesar's ability to stop time was explained when Julia told him "artists stop time with their work"—it was an overly-literal version of how USC-trained filmmaker Coppola sees filmmaking as "pieces of time" (a term the late Peter Bogdanovich used as the title of one of his books, and which Burt Reynolds mocked in HOOPER). It didn't amount to much except to confirm the bond between Cesar and Julia, that she could see it, too, and finally do it as well.
I mostly liked the cast a great deal—though Dustin Hoffman as a Roy Cohn analogue came off more like Mumbles in DICK TRACY than the ruthless "fixer" he was supposed to be. Giancarlo Esposito as Mayor Cicero got at both what was wrong with his worldview, and why throwing it all away for Cesar's unproven dream of Megapolis was how a pragmatic, essentially-good man who refused to let himself believe in miracles would believe and act on. Both John Voight's Hamilton Crassus III and Shia LeBeouf's Clodio Pulcher both excelled as The Men You Love to Hate, and Aubrey Plaza found the menace and desperation under the dry deadpan of her Wow Platinum. (While Voight's quasi-Trump impersonation was both funny and creepy, The Beef managed to be so INCREDIBLY, amazingly hateful that I actually cheered when his story ended!)
Is MEGAPOLIS Francis Ford Coppola's *apologia* for his ego-fueled, soaring ambition? Absolutely—which was exactly what I expected from him. It is a divisive movie? That's...putting it mildly. Do I think it deserves to be a mainstream hit? Hell, no! But am I glad he made it and glad I saw it? Oh, yes—yes, I am....
I tend to think of Shia LeBeouf more as The Actor I Love to Wish Didn't Exist.
(But I enjoyed your critique! I will see it again at some point and reassess, but I can't get away from my initial reaction that it's just a big gold-painted turd.)
MEGALOPOLIS is very much a YMMV experience, kind of like Bollywood movies without all the "item numbers"—you either find it too overstuffed and ridiculous, or you will love how it's like a New York deli sandwich, bursting with all sorts of wonders!
I ended up liking it though it's overlong, and Coppola obviously doesn't care if you get what he's put on your plate or not.
Hear me loudly not disagreeing with your comment about Shia LeBeouf.
Also, love the Bollywood comparison, I've seen a number of bombastic East Indian action movies/musicals and they are unlike anything else on Earth. So wildly over-the-top and unbelievably entertaining, I'm a little bummed that they only seem to influence music videos and TikTok dances and not mainstream filmmaking as a whole.
So am I! Before lockdown/my divorce my former wife and I used to have friends over every Sunday for "Bollywood night", where we'd rent or buy an Indian movie and watch it (we had the bigger television, and often either I'd cook or somebody else would bring something over). We saw a few hundred movies, mostly *masala* (what people mean when they think of "Bollywood"—everything but the kitchen sink plot-wise, with musical number in-between), from classics like DILWALE DULHANIA LE JAYENGE and RAB NE BANA DI JODI to absolute garbage like KAMBAHT ISHQ, an Indian movie without a single scene set in India!
None of us are Southern Asian or anything close to that, but my wife and her friends loved watching SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE, and were looking for movies that would scratch their dance itch between seasons when one friend said, "You know, I understand these 'Bollywood' movies have a lot of dancing in them—maybe we should give them a try?" It was quite the crash course in Indian culture through their entertainment, and what they think of America by the movies they reference and how they reference them (the DHOOM series is THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS on a smaller budget, only with *slightly* less plausible physics!)....
We blitzed through the whole YRF Spy Universe series after seeing Pathaan and Tiger 3 in the theatres locally. I've read some less than savory things about their stars Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan, so I don't know if I'll continue with future installments, but the 5 films I've seen to date have been highly entertaining.
Salman Khan? Yeah, he's kind of an entitled wealthy PoS who ran over several homeless people who were sleeping while in the process of crashing into a bakery, then delayed the trial for so long that the chief witness, a cop, died of tuberculosis! He got off due to "lack of evidence", having outwaited everybody who could testify against him (stop me if this sounds familiar).....
He was also Aishwarya Rai's boyfriend for a while in the early Aughts, and she needed to take out a restraining order against him because he couldn't deal with it being over! Oh, and there was his hunting antelopes, an endangered species, while on location for a movie in Nineties. (The closest that case came to justice was when some religious sect that consider Blackbuck Antelopes sacred opened fire on his house while he was home, though nobody was harmed.)
I haven't heard anything that negative about Shah Rukh Khan, except for people saying he's more a star than an actor....
Oh, I can hear you from here! I fully believe that Megalopolis is the Beyond the Valley of the Dolls of this generation, and 40 years from now there will be a Criterion Collection edition of it with all the bells and whistles. Probably one that you enjoy through the wi-fi receptor we'll all have installed in our brains at birth, but the AI-generated Coppola commentary will be worth the price of the neural uplink.
Yeah it’s kind of hard to explain but it seemed like the entire film was clowning on the idea of ambition.
Cesar’s success happen because they go against basic principles of storytelling. In fact the entire film seems more interested in crazy moments than telling a coherent story.
It got me right in the death drive. Just like blowing all that money on such a piece of buffoonery.
It's HIS money—and I guess it was either this, or hookers and blow. It's not like anybody else gets hit in the pocketbook if it faceplants utterly, not even his wife Eleanor who died this year.... 😢
Which reminds me of Mel Brooks's biggest flop, ROLLERBABIES, a SF movie he was so SURE would be a huge hit he mortgaged he and Anne Bancroft's house to get it made! Bancroft was NOT happy when she found out (and she had a notoriously short temper, which Brooks—mostly loved)—and Brooks said he spent the next decade paying the mortgage off so they didn't lose their home. 🙀
On balance, I still think Coppola took the better bet.
Exactly! One of those jawdrop moments in Mel Brooks's memoirs is when he goes on about how *certain* he was that SOLARBABIES would be the next STAR WARS (which, for all his mockery of STAR WARS, he really loved)—so much so he put his own money into the picture, which he'd never done before.
I'm not sure which Bancroft thought was worse—that he'd put their money into a flop, or that he hadn't told her he was doing it first. He said that when they were dating he was so broke she had to lend him money to take her out—I wonder if she wasn't having flashbacks to that when he told her he'd mortgaged their house to make SOLARBABIES....
Is the director addicted to losing lots of money by making films that are not meant to be a success? At least he isn't going to bankrupt a film studio this time.
Voight may be a scumbag but he was hilarious in this movie. Between drunkenly cheering on the wrestlers and the ridiculous scene with the bow and arrow he was easily the best part of the film.
When I saw you were pumped to see this movie, I thought to myself, OK I hope he knows what he's doing. So many people had panned it But this headline made me do a literal LOL.
This movie looks so bad I'll just have to see it at some point.
I really really enjoyed this review. I’m glad that you actually had the balls to call this shitty indulgent movie out for what it is, rather than just calling it an ambitious mess, a flawed gem or some other BS. Why does Coppola get a pass when he hasn’t made a good movie in three decades and has made mostly duds for four?
I was eagerly awaiting your review of this turkey, because nothing about it appeals to me, but you are so very good at redeeming horrible movies with your takes. I was not disappointed! Thank you for taking the bullet for me and everyone else!
Entertaining pan, but you missed a critical detail: when Nathalie Emmanuel says she'll name her unborn child "Francis," she's talking to her father, "Franklyn Cicero"--FC. Bitter, compromised, regretful, he dresses like Don Vito, struggles to sustain a crumbling institution, and has a daughter who transcends him creatively.
Esposito only gives a bad performance as a cartoon villain in his public persona. Privately, he adores his family, and his misgivings toward Cesar aren't Randian "Taker" envy, but skepticism that utopia is too good to be true. His conflicted vulnerability in those scenes make for the movie's best acting. In the end, he's won over by the better angels of his nature.
I think Cesar is the self-image Coppola had in his unstoppable New Hollywood youth, while Cicero is an admission of how he wound up. The fable isn't an ode to his own triumph dragging Megalopolis over the finish line. It's an earnest plea from an old man for new hotshot geniuses to save Cinema, disprove his cynicism, and drag him into the future. In the last shot, Cesar's baby (a girl named "Sunny Hope," not "Francis") gains power over time.
I liked the movie, but that's an interesting take on it—that Cesar and Cicero are the two sides of Francis Ford Coppola, young hotshot and old man begging for the next generation to finish what he couldn't.
My dog walking on its hinds legs for more than two seconds is also wildly ambitious, but I wouldn't expect millions of people to shell out money to watch it.
Megalopolis is FFC's dog awkwardly walking on its hind legs for over two hours while he turns toward the audience and smiles at the achievement.
I feel like it was either a review of Toys or Battlefield Earth where a critic said that when you hear a filmmaker describe their movie as “a labour of love”, that’s a nice way of saying “nobody with any sense wanted to make this.”
I generally admire Coppola as a director, but the vibe of this fiasco reminds of another of his labours of love, One From the Heart. And I absolutely hated One From the Heart.
I’m still barely halfway through a draft of the script from around 1999-2000, and I’ve never struggled through a script like I have with this one. This is coming from someone who has read a draft of National Lampoon’s Movie Madness, and the Rob Zombie’s unmade The Crow: 2037.
Jebus help me, but I'm going to a 10 p.m. screening of this in IMAX tonight. I expect nothing but a catastrophically appalling trainwreck, and yet I can't stop myself from seeing it with my own eyes. Reading your highly entertaining evisceration of it, and hearing Mark Kermode's sterling rant against it, only heightens my curiosity. I guess it's the same impulse that made me watch two versions of Snyder's Justice League ... maybe somehow Coppola's been possessed by the spirit of Michael Cimino?
Please let us know what you thought of it.
It was like Coppola's insufferable segment from New York Stories stretched out to 140 minutes, and coated in fake gold paint, with a script stolen from first year philosophy oral exams.
I'm seeing it with my best friend tonight!
At Alamo Drafthouse so we're trading IMAX for bar food, but—yeah, I feel like I must see this for myself.
Well? How was it?
I responded right below this comment:
https://open.substack.com/pub/nathanrabin/p/megalopolis-is-an-ambitious-art-film?r=ven3d&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=70808437
I saw MEGAPOLIS tonight—and while it's overblown and flawed, I ended up liking it. It's both brilliant and batshit crazy—my best friend, who saw it with me, described as "The Best and Worst of Francis Ford Coppola". Okay, Nathalie Emanuel's Julia Cicero was everything I liked Zendaya's Chani in DUNE for not being (sweet loving helpmeet of The Great Man), and I wasn't sure what the point to Adam Driver's Cesar Catilina's drunken and drug-fueled excess was—all I knew was I wanted to find him a Twelve-Step Sponsor, at once!
I think the point to Cesar's ability to stop time was explained when Julia told him "artists stop time with their work"—it was an overly-literal version of how USC-trained filmmaker Coppola sees filmmaking as "pieces of time" (a term the late Peter Bogdanovich used as the title of one of his books, and which Burt Reynolds mocked in HOOPER). It didn't amount to much except to confirm the bond between Cesar and Julia, that she could see it, too, and finally do it as well.
I mostly liked the cast a great deal—though Dustin Hoffman as a Roy Cohn analogue came off more like Mumbles in DICK TRACY than the ruthless "fixer" he was supposed to be. Giancarlo Esposito as Mayor Cicero got at both what was wrong with his worldview, and why throwing it all away for Cesar's unproven dream of Megapolis was how a pragmatic, essentially-good man who refused to let himself believe in miracles would believe and act on. Both John Voight's Hamilton Crassus III and Shia LeBeouf's Clodio Pulcher both excelled as The Men You Love to Hate, and Aubrey Plaza found the menace and desperation under the dry deadpan of her Wow Platinum. (While Voight's quasi-Trump impersonation was both funny and creepy, The Beef managed to be so INCREDIBLY, amazingly hateful that I actually cheered when his story ended!)
Is MEGAPOLIS Francis Ford Coppola's *apologia* for his ego-fueled, soaring ambition? Absolutely—which was exactly what I expected from him. It is a divisive movie? That's...putting it mildly. Do I think it deserves to be a mainstream hit? Hell, no! But am I glad he made it and glad I saw it? Oh, yes—yes, I am....
I tend to think of Shia LeBeouf more as The Actor I Love to Wish Didn't Exist.
(But I enjoyed your critique! I will see it again at some point and reassess, but I can't get away from my initial reaction that it's just a big gold-painted turd.)
MEGALOPOLIS is very much a YMMV experience, kind of like Bollywood movies without all the "item numbers"—you either find it too overstuffed and ridiculous, or you will love how it's like a New York deli sandwich, bursting with all sorts of wonders!
I ended up liking it though it's overlong, and Coppola obviously doesn't care if you get what he's put on your plate or not.
Hear me loudly not disagreeing with your comment about Shia LeBeouf.
Also, love the Bollywood comparison, I've seen a number of bombastic East Indian action movies/musicals and they are unlike anything else on Earth. So wildly over-the-top and unbelievably entertaining, I'm a little bummed that they only seem to influence music videos and TikTok dances and not mainstream filmmaking as a whole.
So am I! Before lockdown/my divorce my former wife and I used to have friends over every Sunday for "Bollywood night", where we'd rent or buy an Indian movie and watch it (we had the bigger television, and often either I'd cook or somebody else would bring something over). We saw a few hundred movies, mostly *masala* (what people mean when they think of "Bollywood"—everything but the kitchen sink plot-wise, with musical number in-between), from classics like DILWALE DULHANIA LE JAYENGE and RAB NE BANA DI JODI to absolute garbage like KAMBAHT ISHQ, an Indian movie without a single scene set in India!
None of us are Southern Asian or anything close to that, but my wife and her friends loved watching SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE, and were looking for movies that would scratch their dance itch between seasons when one friend said, "You know, I understand these 'Bollywood' movies have a lot of dancing in them—maybe we should give them a try?" It was quite the crash course in Indian culture through their entertainment, and what they think of America by the movies they reference and how they reference them (the DHOOM series is THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS on a smaller budget, only with *slightly* less plausible physics!)....
We blitzed through the whole YRF Spy Universe series after seeing Pathaan and Tiger 3 in the theatres locally. I've read some less than savory things about their stars Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan, so I don't know if I'll continue with future installments, but the 5 films I've seen to date have been highly entertaining.
Salman Khan? Yeah, he's kind of an entitled wealthy PoS who ran over several homeless people who were sleeping while in the process of crashing into a bakery, then delayed the trial for so long that the chief witness, a cop, died of tuberculosis! He got off due to "lack of evidence", having outwaited everybody who could testify against him (stop me if this sounds familiar).....
He was also Aishwarya Rai's boyfriend for a while in the early Aughts, and she needed to take out a restraining order against him because he couldn't deal with it being over! Oh, and there was his hunting antelopes, an endangered species, while on location for a movie in Nineties. (The closest that case came to justice was when some religious sect that consider Blackbuck Antelopes sacred opened fire on his house while he was home, though nobody was harmed.)
I haven't heard anything that negative about Shah Rukh Khan, except for people saying he's more a star than an actor....
Oh, I can hear you from here! I fully believe that Megalopolis is the Beyond the Valley of the Dolls of this generation, and 40 years from now there will be a Criterion Collection edition of it with all the bells and whistles. Probably one that you enjoy through the wi-fi receptor we'll all have installed in our brains at birth, but the AI-generated Coppola commentary will be worth the price of the neural uplink.
Yeah it’s kind of hard to explain but it seemed like the entire film was clowning on the idea of ambition.
Cesar’s success happen because they go against basic principles of storytelling. In fact the entire film seems more interested in crazy moments than telling a coherent story.
It got me right in the death drive. Just like blowing all that money on such a piece of buffoonery.
It's HIS money—and I guess it was either this, or hookers and blow. It's not like anybody else gets hit in the pocketbook if it faceplants utterly, not even his wife Eleanor who died this year.... 😢
Which reminds me of Mel Brooks's biggest flop, ROLLERBABIES, a SF movie he was so SURE would be a huge hit he mortgaged he and Anne Bancroft's house to get it made! Bancroft was NOT happy when she found out (and she had a notoriously short temper, which Brooks—mostly loved)—and Brooks said he spent the next decade paying the mortgage off so they didn't lose their home. 🙀
On balance, I still think Coppola took the better bet.
SOLARBABIES, which was dominated by kids in roller skates.
Exactly! One of those jawdrop moments in Mel Brooks's memoirs is when he goes on about how *certain* he was that SOLARBABIES would be the next STAR WARS (which, for all his mockery of STAR WARS, he really loved)—so much so he put his own money into the picture, which he'd never done before.
I'm not sure which Bancroft thought was worse—that he'd put their money into a flop, or that he hadn't told her he was doing it first. He said that when they were dating he was so broke she had to lend him money to take her out—I wonder if she wasn't having flashbacks to that when he told her he'd mortgaged their house to make SOLARBABIES....
Is the director addicted to losing lots of money by making films that are not meant to be a success? At least he isn't going to bankrupt a film studio this time.
His car has a bumper sticker that says "I'm Spending $120m Of Roman's and Nicolas's Inheritance".
Nic just would have blown it on paying back taxes anyway.
And dinosaur skulls.
Or really rare issues of Action Comics. That he'd then have to sell to pay off his back taxes.
Voight may be a scumbag but he was hilarious in this movie. Between drunkenly cheering on the wrestlers and the ridiculous scene with the bow and arrow he was easily the best part of the film.
Also Aubrey Plaza. It seemed like they were the only two actors who understood what the movie they were making was.
I love you Nathan. This was the review I had been waitng for. (Long time lurker and patron here.)
When I saw you were pumped to see this movie, I thought to myself, OK I hope he knows what he's doing. So many people had panned it But this headline made me do a literal LOL.
This movie looks so bad I'll just have to see it at some point.
I voted for you to see Wolfs, btw.
I hated this movie but god willing people will enjoy the review.
Not that Wolfs is a big step up…. Although after watching Megapolis, Wolfs will look like an Oscar contender.
I really really enjoyed this review. I’m glad that you actually had the balls to call this shitty indulgent movie out for what it is, rather than just calling it an ambitious mess, a flawed gem or some other BS. Why does Coppola get a pass when he hasn’t made a good movie in three decades and has made mostly duds for four?
::Clodio, Cesar, and Clodio all have amorous relations with Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza)::
Is that a joke or a typo, Nabin?
The more I read you and the ever-unearnedly arrogant INDIEWIRE critic David E_H_rlich hating on this movie, the more I know I have to see it.
I was eagerly awaiting your review of this turkey, because nothing about it appeals to me, but you are so very good at redeeming horrible movies with your takes. I was not disappointed! Thank you for taking the bullet for me and everyone else!
Entertaining pan, but you missed a critical detail: when Nathalie Emmanuel says she'll name her unborn child "Francis," she's talking to her father, "Franklyn Cicero"--FC. Bitter, compromised, regretful, he dresses like Don Vito, struggles to sustain a crumbling institution, and has a daughter who transcends him creatively.
Esposito only gives a bad performance as a cartoon villain in his public persona. Privately, he adores his family, and his misgivings toward Cesar aren't Randian "Taker" envy, but skepticism that utopia is too good to be true. His conflicted vulnerability in those scenes make for the movie's best acting. In the end, he's won over by the better angels of his nature.
I think Cesar is the self-image Coppola had in his unstoppable New Hollywood youth, while Cicero is an admission of how he wound up. The fable isn't an ode to his own triumph dragging Megalopolis over the finish line. It's an earnest plea from an old man for new hotshot geniuses to save Cinema, disprove his cynicism, and drag him into the future. In the last shot, Cesar's baby (a girl named "Sunny Hope," not "Francis") gains power over time.
I liked the movie, but that's an interesting take on it—that Cesar and Cicero are the two sides of Francis Ford Coppola, young hotshot and old man begging for the next generation to finish what he couldn't.
My dog walking on its hinds legs for more than two seconds is also wildly ambitious, but I wouldn't expect millions of people to shell out money to watch it.
Megalopolis is FFC's dog awkwardly walking on its hind legs for over two hours while he turns toward the audience and smiles at the achievement.
I feel like it was either a review of Toys or Battlefield Earth where a critic said that when you hear a filmmaker describe their movie as “a labour of love”, that’s a nice way of saying “nobody with any sense wanted to make this.”
I generally admire Coppola as a director, but the vibe of this fiasco reminds of another of his labours of love, One From the Heart. And I absolutely hated One From the Heart.
I’m still barely halfway through a draft of the script from around 1999-2000, and I’ve never struggled through a script like I have with this one. This is coming from someone who has read a draft of National Lampoon’s Movie Madness, and the Rob Zombie’s unmade The Crow: 2037.
This movie was like being inside a flash mob and not knowing it.
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